PrintHaru IoT & Retail
PrintHaru, scan and print in seconds at your local shop
How we built PrintHaru, a scan-and-print service that ties together a phone app, cloud servers, a printer box in each shop, and secure payments.
- Scan and print
- In seconds, no staff needed
- iOS, Android, Web
- One app for all three
- Encrypted
- From phone to printer
The idea
Printing at a local shop usually means a queue, a cable and a busy shopkeeper. PrintHaru makes it self-service. A customer scans a QR code, uploads their file, picks their print settings, pays and it prints on the shop's printer on its own.
What we built
- A phone and web app (built once with Expo) that runs on iOS, Android and the web, with a file preview and print settings built in.
- Cloud servers to handle print jobs, payments and running the shops.
- A small printer box in each shop (a Raspberry Pi) that safely picks up jobs and sends them to the printer. No customer device ever talks to the printer directly.
- Security the whole way through, so the connection between the cloud and each shop's box is locked down and files are encrypted.
Why it matters
PrintHaru has a lot of moving parts: a phone app, cloud servers, payments and physical hardware, all of which have to run on their own in the real world. We built each part to fail safely, so a jammed printer or a dropped connection never charges someone for a print that did not come out.